Hardly a day goes by at the moment without an issue of medical ethics being raised in the media. Whether it's racist donors attempting to insist that their organs should go only to white people, courts deciding that teenagers should receive heart transplants against their will, or the perennial problems raised by different definitions of the right to life, the ethical quandaries faced by the medical profession become ever more complex, along with the potential legal ramifications. Hence the latest addition to hospital staff - and now to TV medical drama - the clinical ethicist.
In Life Support, the new drama series from BBC Scotland, Aisling O'Sullivan plays Katherine Doone, a clinical ethicist working at a large teaching hospital in Glasgow, with the declared aim of stopping the doctors from playing God. "It's quite a new area in medicine," says O'Sullivan of her character's unusual job description. "It's already becoming established in America, but in the UK there are still only about seven of them in the country."
This is the first leading role in a primetime serial drama for Kerry-born O'Sullivan, whose career has gone from strength to strength since leaving the Gaiety School of Acting in 1993. She appeared in a small role in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins before going on to play Francie Brady's mother in Jordan's The Butcher Boy, and her extensive stage experience includes roles in The Playboy of the Western World, The Seagull and Hysteria. She is currently appearing in The Maids at the Young Vic in London, but admits that taking on this role was a new experience: "This is a totally different discipline: when the camera is on, you have to go straight into the character right away, and inhabit it completely. Being new to it, I found it very demanding, and had to trust my own instincts. You only really know if you've been doing the right thing when you see it on screen."
She agrees that the idea of yet another medical drama didn't excite her at first. "Initially, when I read the script and saw that it was a medical drama, I wasn't interested, but then I saw that it was addressing these subjects in a very different way from what we're used to."
In the series, Katherine Doone is a 33-year-old lawyer who has decided to change her career path in mid-stream following the death of her mother, travelling to the US to obtain a PhD in medical ethics, to the dismay of her father, a top criminal lawyer (Richard Wilson, of One Foot in the Grave fame, in an unusually straight TV role). "As soon as we saw her audition tape, we knew," says series creator Ashley Pharoah of O'Sullivan. "She had just what we wanted. You can believe the intellectual stature. the gravitas; she's young and attractive - and she can do comedy. She is perfect for Katherine."
At first, Pharoah couldn't see how to create a popular drama about ethics. "But then I met David Cook, who is an ethicist, dealing not with intellectual committees, but at the coal-face where members of the public come to him with real, ethical dilemmas. He was the key to giving the series a human face."
Cook is a PhD, fellow and chaplain of Green College, Oxford, who acted as adviser and consultant ethicist to the series. "In a society with differing moral values, people come to different conclusions," he says. "The role of a medical ethicist is to make people think through the consequences and the principles on which they are making decisions - and then enable them to live with that."
"Medicine has become so complicated that the man in the street doesn't know what's going on," says O'Sullivan. "So this is a new and necessary discipline. I watched David at work in Oxford and doing the radio show The Moral Maze - I learned a lot. He sees himself as a negotiator, as opposed to coming in brandishing a set of theories, or a ready-made decision."
In Monday's programme, the second in the series, a decision must be made about a risky bone marrow transplant on a young leukaemia sufferer, and it's up to Doone to assert the rights of the 11-year-old patient to have some say in the matter. Further episodes cover such issues as euthanasia, suicide and the competing rights of first and second families. It remains to be seen how audiences respond to the storylines and characters thrown up by Life Support, but O'Sullivan is optimistic.
"We haven't had much feedback yet. With a series like this, the first episode always has to spend a lot of time trying to define the characters in black and white, and then you can really start to get going. This is absolutely popular drama, dealing with issues that affect us all. I'll be interested to hear what people think, but it's too early to know yet."
Life Support is on BBC1 on Monday at 9.30 p.m.
